THE MONUMENTS MEN: a monumental disaster

THE MONUMENTS MEN is a disjointed, dull, superficial and monumentally unengaging piece of cinema.
Director, producer, co-screenwriter and star George Clooney has bitten off considerably more than he can get into his mouth, let alone chew, with this misguided attempt to tell the story of a small band of art experts operating on the frontline in post D-Day western Europe to recover some of the hundreds of thousands of art treasures looted by the Nazis.

The Allied invasion of Europe and subsequent advance across the continent towards Berlin was an enormous undertaking which doesn't easily lend itself to retelling within a 1 hour 56 minute time frame, and the film repeatedly highlights the folly of attempting to do so. The story hopscotches from the US to the UK to France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and who knows where-else in a series of disjointed stories within the story which are too short to offer anything more than a snapshot of a particular moment in a particular part of the war, and it's sometimes far from clear just which part of the war we're dropping in on.
Clooney and co-star Matt Damon breeze through the death and destruction all around them with the same nonchalance that they brought to the considerably more lightweight 'Ocean's 11/12/13' series, leaving it to a couple of their senior supporting cast (Jean Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville) to remind us that some people actually got killed in this particular escapade. The all-star cast (Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban),  the method of their recruitment into Clooney's team, and their underdeveloped characters only adds to the sensation of an 'Ocean's 11' retread with a CGI battle-devastated Europe taking the place of the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.
THE MONUMENTS MEN exudes the same kind of cinematic inauthenticity that pervades so many Hollywood studio-bound war films of the 1940s and 1950s but minus any of the style which served as those films' saving grace. Perhaps if Clooney had focused on just one of his responsibilities instead of trying to write, produce, direct and star in the thing, he might have created (or co-created) a more polished, coherent and engaging movie, but in trying to balance so many hats on his one (undeniably suave and charming) head he's given us a monumentally crashing snore-fest.